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The Eyrie pierced the clouds. Cold wind cut to the bone.
A weary raven arrived from the direction of the Bloody Gate, carrying news that shattered the false celebration before it could take hold.
The Bloody Gate was gone.
Not breached. Not burned.
Gone.
A Frost Giant had erased it from the map of Westeros with a single punch. And then the Wildling army, that force without equal, simply walked away. As if they'd only been passing through. As if demolishing it had been nothing more than clearing away a minor inconvenience.
In the Moon Door Garden, the Vale nobles who moments ago had been cheering for their "certain victory" now stood like chickens with their necks wrung.
Pale faces. Dead silence.
What did this man Lynn actually want?
He possessed the power to crush the entire Vale without breaking a sweat, yet he'd chosen to play games with them. A duel. A gentleman's arrangement. And they had believed it.
They thought they'd grabbed a lifeline.
They hadn't realized it was just a dragon extending one claw, humoring them.
"He's humiliating us!"
A knight's face flushed red, his voice shaking with equal parts anger and fear.
"Silence!"
Ser Grafton's roar cut him off.
The old knight's own face was grim. But behind his clouded eyes, something stirred that no one else quite understood.
Humiliation?
No.
If Lynn wanted to humiliate them, he would have let the dragon circle the Eyrie day after day. He would have let the giant wander the Mountains of the Moon like a man taking a morning stroll. Their dignity, their honor, would have been ground down slowly, worn away by endless fear.
But Lynn hadn't done that.
He'd given them a choice.
An absurd choice, yes. But the only one that let them keep the last of their pride.
A duel.
"He's not humiliating us," Ser Gladdie said, his voice heavy.
"He's giving us a way out."
The words landed like stones. Everyone went still.
"He showed us exactly how powerful he is, in a way we couldn't refuse." He paused. "And he chose a way we could accept to end this war."
Ser Marq Arryn exhaled slowly, bitterness carved into every line of his face.
"Win, and we keep the Vale."
"Lose, and we bend the knee to a king with the power of a god, who still chose mercy."
"Either way, we don't walk away with nothing."
Silence settled over them.
They finally understood.
This King-Beyond-the-Wall had never seen them as real enemies. Not once, from the very beginning. Everything he had done was calculated to unite Westeros at the lowest possible cost. They were pieces on his board. Pieces that needed to be brought into line, not destroyed.
Understanding that didn't make it easier. A helplessness washed over every noble in that garden, and beneath it, almost shamefully, a thread of relief.
"Stop brooding. Prepare for the duel."
Ser Gladdie drew the greatsword planted in the earth before him, slow and deliberate. The old fire came back into his eyes.
"Lord Lynn has given us the chance to defend our honor. We won't waste it."
"Bring forward the Vale's finest. Release Bronze Yohn!"
"We fight today for the glory of the Vale!"
---
The Moon Door Garden had been remade into an arena.
Whatever exotic flowers and rare plants once grew here had long since been scorched away by the heat Winter breathed out without thinking. The flat ground was now covered in a thick layer of yellow sand.
One hundred Vale knights stood in formation. Polished heavy armor. The finest weapons. A wall of steel, airtight and immovable.
The best warriors the Vale had to offer.
At their head stood "Bronze Yohn" Royce, freshly released from the sky cells. The Lord of Runestone was tall, broad, and carried himself like a man who had never once doubted his own strength. Prison hadn't dulled his eyes. They were still sharp as a hawk's. He stood without moving, without speaking, like a mountain that had simply decided to stand there.
Beside him: Grafton, Royce, every celebrated knight and warrior the great Vale houses could claim. A lineup that would have made any army think twice.
Then their opponents appeared.
Lynn was in casual clothes. Not a scrap of leather armor on him.
Behind him walked nine figures in black cloaks, faces hidden, identities unclear.
Ten people. Standing loose, almost bored.
The contrast with the hundred-man steel phalanx across from them was almost funny.
Almost.
"Lord Lynn." Bronze Yohn's voice rang out like a bell. "You can still change your mind."
He hadn't heard what happened outside these past three days, but someone had explained the duel's terms. He found them absurd.
"Change my mind?" Lynn smiled, like he'd just heard a decent joke.
He walked to the center of the field, pressed a candle into the sand, and lit it himself with a flint. The orange flame bent in the wind.
"Candle's lit. Duel begins." He glanced back at the hundred knights. "As far as I'm concerned, it's already over."
He stepped aside, found a chair, and sat down.
Then he lifted one hand and waved lazily at the black-cloaked figures behind him.
"Go on. Play with the knights a little." A brief pause. "Hold back. Don't break them."
One of the black-cloaked figures bowed slightly.
Then it walked forward alone, stiff-gaited, to the center of the field.
Silence.
The entire garden went quiet in an instant. Smiles died on faces. Bronze Yohn's voice caught in his throat.
Ten against a hundred had already felt like an insult. But one against a hundred?
One?
What was this supposed to mean? That their hundred greatest warriors, the finest fighters the Vale had ever produced, were only worth facing a single servant?
Bronze Yohn's whole body was shaking.
This was humiliation. Pure, absolute humiliation.
It lit the knights like a torch to dry tinder.
"Kill!"
No speeches needed. The nearest dozen knights exploded forward with animal roars, converging from every angle on that lone black figure. Gleaming blades. Heavy axes. The shriek of weapons cutting air. Every angle covered. Every escape route sealed.
The black-cloaked figure didn't move.
It stood perfectly still, as if the storm of steel bearing down on it was nothing more than a mild breeze.
The first longsword was a heartbeat from its hood.
It raised its right hand.
A deep blue chill erupted from its palm, visible to the naked eye.
The temperature dropped to freezing in an instant.
And then, as every person in that garden watched in horror, a sword formed in its hand from nothing. A longsword built entirely of pure ice, conjured from the air itself. Its shape was strange and elegant at once, the blade laced with frost-flower patterns, radiating a cold silence that felt like it could freeze the soul.
This was not a weapon that belonged to the mortal world.
CLANG!
The first knight's sword came down hard on the ice blade.
No sparks. No ring of steel on steel.
Just a sound like shattering glass.
The fine steel longsword froze on contact, turned brittle in an instant, and snapped. Piece by piece, it fell away.
The knight's face hadn't finished forming its expression of shock before the ice sword moved, tracing a clean arc at a speed the eye couldn't track.
A soft sound. Almost nothing.
The knight's body went rigid.
His head and his body parted along a cut glazed white with frost.
Then, slowly, they separated.
One stroke.
Dead.
The garden was silent as a tomb. Every mind went blank.
The nightmare had only just started.
The black-cloaked figure moved. Every step was ghost-quick, every swing precise and lethal.
CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
Weapon after weapon met the ice sword and shattered. Steel swords, castle-forged blades treasured by noble houses for generations, it didn't matter. Against that ice sword, they were rotten wood.
One knight raised a heavy tower shield.
The ice sword tapped it once.
CRACK!
Shield, armor, and all shattered in an instant, frozen through and punched apart in a single motion. The sword tip emerged from the man's back trailing a spray of ice-blue mist.
Slaughter. One-sided, absolute slaughter.
The first knights to charge were all down in less than ten breaths. Every corpse was thick with frost. Every face was locked in the same expression: terror and disbelief, preserved in the moment of death.
"A demon! It's a demon!"
Screams tore through the crowd. The nobles who had been shouting loudest were now scrambling backward on hands and knees, desperate to put distance between themselves and the black figure moving through their knights like a scythe.
"Everyone charge! All at once!" Bronze Yohn broke free of his shock and bellowed. "There's only one of it! We have a hundred! We can wear it down!"
The surviving knights dug past their fear and found something harder underneath. They roared, closed into a tight ring, and threw themselves at the black-cloaked figure in a final desperate charge.
They hit a monster that didn't tire and didn't feel pain.
No breath. No heartbeat. Stamina without end.
A war axe caught it square in the shoulder from behind. The blow landed with a dull thud and did nothing. Didn't even make it sway. The axe itself shattered from the cold.
The knight who swung it stared at his empty hands for one stunned second.
The Other turned around and cut him in half. One stroke. Man and armor both.
"Stop."
Lynn's voice, quiet and unhurried.
The black-cloaked figure froze mid-motion. The ice sword hung in place, its tip resting at a knight's throat. Frost was already forming on the man's neck from the cold radiating off the blade. One inch further and he was dead.
"I said don't break them." Lynn's tone carried just the right note of mild reproach. "It's a spar. Break some limbs, that's fine. You really don't know your own strength."
The black-cloaked figure turned and bowed silently toward Lynn.
Then it went back to work.
This time, no killing.
The ice sword flipped to its flat.
THUD. A knight sailed through the air, chest armor caved in, hit the ground coughing blood and didn't get up.
CRACK. Another knight's arm snapped at a wrong angle.
It wasn't killing anymore.
But somehow the fear was worse.
It was playing with them. Cat and mouse. Toying with the finest knights in Westeros like they were there for its amusement.
Bronze Yohn's eyes went red.
He roared and charged.
The black-cloaked figure didn't even bother with its sword. It simply extended its left hand and caught Bronze Yohn's blade bare-handed.
Steel met a hand built of living ice. A grinding, teeth-aching hiss filled the air.
Then, as Bronze Yohn watched, unable to believe what he was seeing, the black-cloaked figure closed its fingers.
CLATTER!
The steel sword crumbled to pieces in its grip.
Time stopped.
Every person in the garden stared at the broken stub of blade lying in the sand. Then at Lynn, still sitting in his chair, that faint smile on his face.
The candle had burned less than a tenth of the way down.
Their hundred greatest knights had been broken by a single opponent.
Their honor. Their courage. Everything. Gone.
"What..." Ser Gladdie's voice barely held together. "What is that thing..."
Lynn stood. He brushed the dust from his hands and walked to the center of the field.
He pointed at the black-cloaked figure holding Bronze Yohn off the ground by the throat, one-handed.
"That one counts as one."
Then he turned slowly and pointed at the eight black-cloaked figures who had stood completely still from the moment this began.
Every eye in the garden followed.
The next moment burned itself into memory forever.
The eight figures moved as one, as if responding to a signal no one else could hear. Every arm rose at the exact same instant, not a fraction of a second between them.
A low, resonant hum filled the air.
Eight ice swords appeared, each one identical to the blade that had just dismantled a hundred knights, each one blazing with cold blue light, conjured from nothing.
Eight tips pointed straight at the sky.
Silence.
The chill pouring off those eight blades dropped the temperature of the Moon Door Garden to freezing. And the hearts of every Vale man and woman present dropped with it, down into something that felt like it had no bottom.
Lynn looked at their faces, twisted by fear beyond anything they had ever known. His smile shifted into something harder to read.
He pointed at himself.
"One more thing."
"This doesn't include me."
And as the words left his mouth, ice armor spread across his body. In each hand, a greatsword of pure ice formed from the air, solid and gleaming and impossibly cold.
➤ Next: Robert Secured